Danielle Steel: Crossings

“Very well.” He stood up and picked up his hat. Even in these times he always wore a striped suit and a vest and a homburg, as he had during his years in the diplomatic service. He followed the soldiers outside to the car that had been sent for him. He always went in style, not that he cared. It still turned his stomach to realize what people, whispering “traitor,” thought as he drove by.

But today Armand was not ushered in to the usual office. He was led into the office of the military command, and wondered what ugly new project they had for him now. No matter. He smiled to himself. He wouldn't have time to complete it. In three days he was leaving.

“De Villiers?” The German accent in French grated on his nerves as always, but he was concentrating on walking into the office without limping. He was in no way prepared for what came next. Three officers of the SS stood waiting for him. He had been discovered. A collection of evidence was laid out before him, including half-burned scraps of paper he had burned only the day before, and as he looked into the commanding officer's eyes, he knew. He had been betrayed by André Marchand.

“I don't understand … these are not—”

“Silence!” the officer roared. “Silence! I will speak and you will listen! You are a French pig, like all of the others, and when we finish with you today, you will squeal just like all the filthy pigs!” But they wanted no information from him at all, they wanted nothing. They wanted only to tell him what they knew, to prove to him the superior mind of the Germans. And when the commanding officer had finished his recital, which was pathetically incomplete, much to Armand's relief—they still knew almost nothing, he thanked God—he was led from the room by the SS. It was only then that he felt a tingle in his spine, that the leg dragged, that he thought of Liane, and Moulin, and he felt a creeping desperation. Before that the adrenaline hadn't been flowing too fast in his veins, but now it flowed faster and his mind whirled, and he reminded himself again and again that it had been worth it. That it was worth giving his life for his country … pour la France … he said it over to himself again and again and again as they tied him to a post in the courtyard outside the office of the High Command. As they shot him he shouted a single word, “Liane!” and the word echoed as he slumped, having died for his country.

n June 28, 1942, eight German agents were caught by the FBI on Long Island. They had been delivered there by German U-boats, which served to remind everyone how closely the German's hugged the eastern seaboard. Already, since the beginning of 1942, the Germans had sunk 681 ships in the Atlantic, and had lost almost no ships of their own.

“And that is why we've interned the Japanese.” Liane's uncle admonished her over breakfast in San Francisco. Only days before she had told him that she thought it was cruel and unnecessary. Their own gardener and his family were interned in one of the camps, and the treatment they were getting was worse than cruel. They had limited food, almost no medical supplies, and lived in quarters that wouldn't decently house animals. “I don't give a damn. If we didn't, the Japanese would be sending agents over here like the Germans, and they'd be getting lost in the crowd just like those eight tried to.”

“I don't agree with you, Uncle George.”

“Can you say that with Nick over there fighting the Japs?”

“I can. The people in the camps are Americans.”

“Nobody knows if they're loyal and we can't afford to take the chance.” It was something they had disagreed on before. He wisely decided to change the subject. “Are you working at the hospital today?” She was a full nurse's aide now and had stepped up her schedule from three times a week to five.

“Yes.”

“You work too hard.” His eyes softened and she smiled. She had been working every moment that she could since she had sent Nick the letter. As had happened after their days on the Deauville , she was haunted by thoughts of him again now. But now coupled with her own sense of loss was a sense of terror that her abandoning him would cause him to be careless. She only hoped that his love for his son would remind him to be careful. And she knew she had had no choice. Her first and only duty was still to her husband. She had closed her eyes to it for a time, but that time was over.

“What are you doing today, Uncle George?” She pushed Nick gently from her head as she did a thousand times a day. She had to live with the guilt now, and the fear that perhaps some vague intuition of what she had done had harmed Armand. She had to make up for it now and she was writing to him again every day, although she knew that the letters reached him in clumps, when the censors got around to going over them.

“I'm having lunch with Lou Lawson at my club.” His face clouded over then and his voice was husky when he spoke again. “His boy, Lyman, was killed at Midway.” Liane looked up. Lyman Lawson had been the attorney her uncle had tried to fix her up with when she'd first arrived in San Francisco.

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“So was I. Lou's taking it very hard. Lyman was his only child.”

It reminded her again that Nick was there. But she couldn't allow herself to think of it or she would go mad. Nick was in the Pacific, fighting the Japanese, Armand in France, dealing with the Germans. Her heart was torn from one side of the world to the other. “I have to go to work.” It was the only place she got away from it and even there, especially there, the war was ever present. Every day they brought wounded boys back on the troop ships, with their own horrible tales to tell of war in the Pacific. But at least she could help them, she could soothe brows, put compresses on, feed them, hold them, touch them.

“Don't work yourself too hard, Liane.”

As she left the house he bemoaned the fact that she wasn't like the other girls, or damn few of them. Most of them spent their time arranging dinner parties for the officers. But no, Liane had to empty bedpans and scrub floors and watch men vomit when they came out of surgery. But as always, he had to admire her for it.

It was two weeks later when she came back to find Armand's letter. He complained of the leg again, and she was worried. And he said something about going to London with Moulin, and now she knew that there was trouble. And for an instant her heart soared … if he got out … but her hopes died with his next words. “It breaks my heart to be leaving soon with Moulin, but the only thing that cheers me is the knowledge that I will come back shortly, only to fight harder.” It was all he thought about now, and she was almost angry as she read through the letter. He was fifty-nine years old. Why couldn't he let them fight the war and come home to her? Why? … à la mort et à tout jamais , she read … France was his whole life. There had been a time when there had been more than that, much more. And as she sat staring at his letter, she realized that nothing had ever been the same for them again since the moment they'd stepped off the Normandie . There had been those agonizing months before the war when he worked himself to the bone, and the tension of the months between September and the fall of Paris when she hadn't known what he was doing. And then she and the girls had left France, leaving Armand to fight his single-handed battle against the Germans, while pretending to collaborate with them. It was almost more than she could bear as she read the letter again and put it down. She was dead tired. She had spent the whole day nursing a boy who had lost his arms in the battle of the Coral Sea. He had been on the Lexington with Nick, but he was only a private and hadn't known him.